*After posting this blog, I FINALLY got a response from YA Bound. Apparently, ownership had been transferred and my tour was lost in the mix. The new owner, Sara, has generously offered to do what she can to make things right.*
I booked a blog tour with YA Bound Book Tours in June for my newly released audio books, The Witch Song Series. The tour was supposed to happen the end of August (for a link to the tour, click here). I paid my money and waited for the tour organizer, Nereyda, to get back to me with a list of how many codes per book (there are 4 books total).
And I waited. A long time. Finally, I contacted Nereyda. She sent me a list of people and wanted me to go through and approve or disprove any of them. Not my job. That's what I pay a tour organizer for. I told her how many codes I had. It was her job to organize and discover the value of the hosts. Nevertheless, I had enough codes for all of them, and a quick perusal showed many of them to be bloggers who I had worked with in the past. And I don't mind helping out newbies or those with smaller blogs, as long as they post their reviews in multiple locations.
I approved them all.
Weeks went by. A started to get contacts from bloggers who had signed up and never received their codes. I contacted Nereyda. Crickets. Finally, she told me these bloggers were known pirates and they didn't work with them. Which shocked me. I had worked with them, some of them are on my street team, and never had a problem with them. Also, why was she taking more codes than she would use? The books sell for upwards of 25 dollars, so those codes are worth a lot!
One of the bloggers finally forwarded me the email Nereyda sent her, claiming she'd only received the audible codes that weekend. Which was absolutely not true. She'd had them for much longer.
Still, not worth rocking the boat. I instructed her to send the codes to everyone I had approved.
A few weeks went by. I contacted Nereyda numerous times only to hear nothing back. Finally, Nereyda said the tour was scheduled for September (not true), so things would run then. Again, I let it go. After all, I wasn't in a hurry.
September came and went. I received one email, informing me that Nereyda was still waiting on some bloggers before she would put up the links for the rest of the posts, and yet a google search didn't reveal any audibook reviews from bloggers. Since Oct. 5th, I have stopped receiving any kind of response.
I sent an email December 19th that said exactly the following:
"So it has been MONTHS (my reviews were supposed to go live in August) and I haven't seen any reviews. You have stopped responding to my emails. I'm starting to think you stole my money and my codes. If I don't hear back from you in one week, I'm going public with this to warn off other authors."
Crickets.
On Monday, I decided to try again via twitter in case my emails were somehow getting lost in spam land and I'd been forgotten. Still nothing.
